Ever since the classical works of Smith and Veblen, economists have recognized that individuals care about their relative positions and status in addition to their own consumption. This paper addresses a new framework of choice experiments in order to specify the shape of utility function with...

Designing efficient environmental policies requires knowledge about households' preference parameters for their intertemporal decisions. By conducting an original Internet-based survey using Japanese participants (n=2,906) and a follow-up survey (n=1,407), we examine how people evaluate...

We consider a dynamic macroeconomic model of households that regard relative affluence as social status. The measure of relative affluence can be the ratio to, or the difference from, the social average. The two specifications lead to quite different results: under the ratio specification full...

Economists have long been concerned that negative attitudes about relative income reduce social welfare. This paper investigates whether such attitudes can be mitigated by a simple information treatment. Toward this end, we conducted an original randomized online survey experiment in the US and...

While there is now something of a consensus in the literature on the economics of happiness that income comparisons to others help determine subjective wellbeing, debate continues over the relative importance of own and reference-group income, in particular in research on the Easterlin paradox....

We consider a dynamic macroeconomic model with households that regard relative affluence as social status. The measure of relative affluence can be the ratio to, or the difference from, the social average. The two specifications lead to quite different results: with the ratio specification full...

We propose a new avenue for studying income comparisons effects, namely hypothetical discrete choice experiments in which respondents are presented with alternative combinations of hypothetical monthly income amounts, both for themselves and certain reference persons. With this experimental...